Don't drain you marketing cashflow

Lets talk about barter for a bit. I have been using it as a way to save money, for about 10 years now, and I still think it's a great cash-flow strategy.

I cut my bartering chops in Asia, which happens to be very into the concept of barter. I worked with Barter Card International on their branding and marketing for several years. They do about 2.5 Billion dollars in barter each year to put them in perspective and the pressure was on to build a sold presence in South East Asia.

With all companies that are in the midst of expansion they where very concerned with their cash-flow. The concept we came up with was to create ads that not only repositioned them as a business-to-business tool but to also raise their overall brand image to equal American Express or Visa, plus do it using barter.

This approach helped create an actual example of how the new barter systems outperformed the older one-on-one style of barter everyone has tried at least once in there life.

For the initial campaign we created 6 stunning images (in the Annie Liebowitz style). Using the actual owners of six businesses that where using barter to build up their businesses. The media buy was all print and covered many forms including full color and full page newspaper ads and glassy business magazines spreads. (The second year we expanded to radio as as well.)

We then used a Barter Card member PR firm to tell the story of how we created the ad series using 98% barter. A typical production and media buy breakdown (click on image for full size view) looked like this:

Photography - 100% Barter
Whisky for fire chief and men - Cash
Woman's wardrobe - 100% Barter
Location scouting and preproduction - 100% Barter
Design, production and art direction - 100% Barter
Media buy for magazines and newspapers - 100% Barter
Food for crew - 50% Barter and 50% Cash
Wrap party - 100% Barter

This way we where able to maximize our exposure with editorial content in followup issues of the papers and magazines. The Barter Card budget for the series of 6 ads including placement was just under $300,000 so that came to around $294,000 in Barter and the rest cash.

Think about how you could make barter work for your business by moving unwanted stock or filling downtime at your business to create barter credits that you can use to create marketing tools to inherence your cash-flow by your communicating barter and non-barter customers.

If you would be interested in checking out how the new barter systems can help your business just google "barter + your cities name" to find your local barter business. I use www.barterfirst.com because of the great customer service they have provided for my business over the years.

Next time lets lets learn about great ads.